The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

Crivano looks at Verzelin again. He’s rolling his forehead back and forth across the wood, spilling his wine. Can he still work? Crivano asks. As if this concern has only now occurred to him.

  Serena is silent for a moment. Then he flips aside the folds of white cotton that envelop the parcel before him.

  The gesture seems to uncover a hole cut through the tabletop. Leaning forward, Crivano expects to see Serena’s legs, but his eyes find instead the exposed beams of the ceiling—and then a face, his own, with terrible clarity. He puts a hand on the table’s edge to keep his balance.

  Go on, dottore. Pick it up.

  Crivano slips his slender fingers beneath the cloth and lifts the mirror to his face. It’s about a foot long, several inches across, rounded at the corners, in precise accordance with Tristão’s sketch. The glass is perfectly flat, uniformly thick and clear. Crivano tilts it toward the firelight to check the silvering and finds no blemishes. A dancing ghost-light appears across the room, on the wall above the hearth, and then vanishes when he tilts the glass back.

  Verzelin made this? Crivano asks.

  Serena smoothes his thick beard, watching Verzelin with weary eyes. Made it, he says, or caused it to be made.

  It’s remarkable. Flawless.

  Nearly so, yes.

  Is the glass that your shop makes so clear?

  Serena grunts. Even clearer, dottore, he says. If I want it to be. But if you ask me, which I admit you did not, I’d tell you that this glass is too clear. Your friend had better keep the damp off it, or in a year or two—

  He makes a flatulent sound with his mouth.

  —it’s gone. Melted away like a fancy sweet. Very clear glass cannot abide moisture, dottore. Your friend should keep this wrapped in dried seaweed, always. For what he’s paying he should make it last.

  Crivano is barely listening, staring at his own face. Like every gentleman, he owns a small steel mirror, and over the years it has taught him to recognize himself. But this glass has made it a liar. He sees himself now as others see him, have always seen him: the shape of his head, the way his expression changes, the space his body fills in a room. He scans the map of damage written across his face and wonders how much can be deciphered: the divot in his jaw from a janissary arrow, the ear notched in Silistra by a whore’s hidden razor, the front tooth chipped by the boot of a Persian onbashı in the instant before the musket went off. With a quick intake of breath Crivano replaces the cloth and pushes the parcel back toward Serena. How long to attach the frame? he asks.

  Not long. No more than a day.

  My friend won’t need it so quickly.

  Once it’s finished, Serena says with a sad smile, I don’t want it in my shop.

  He reaches into his tunic—good fabric, Crivano notices, and fairly clean—and produces a rectangle of white paper, folded and closed with a blue wax seal bearing the device of the Siren, his family’s shop. Give this to your friend, he says. It’s my estimate, along with a list of alterations I’ve made to his design. If any are unacceptable, I must be informed prior to sundown tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll complete the piece.

  Crivano takes the paper, tucks it into his own doublet. There’s a commotion: Verzelin is on his feet, staggering. The man with the cittern angles away, ignoring him, pretending to tune his strings. Christ! Verzelin shouts, followed by something Crivano can’t make out. A thread of phlegm dangles from his beard, golden in the firelight. Crivano sees a pair of dark stains on the table Verzelin left. The smaller is spilled wine; the larger, he realizes, is saliva.

  Verzelin walks toward them, lurching spasmodically at every other step. He walks among us, brothers! he hisses. He’s pointing at Crivano. Promises! Promises! Promises of deliverance!

  Crivano keeps his eyes steady. The front of Verzelin’s shirt is soaked with sweat and drool. Amazing, Crivano thinks: all those hours at the furnaces, and still so much phlegm. Surely he’s incurable now. Still, best not to take chances.

  Verzelin shapes his words with effort, seeming to gag on them. I have called! he says. I am his prophet! The peacock, he’s a holy bird, isn’t he a holy bird? He walks our streets! Follow him, brothers!

  He’s out the door, gone. Crivano tenses, tries to keep the strain off his face.

  That, Serena says, is not quite the sort of piety I was talking about.

  I should speak with him.

  Not much of a point, dottore.

  I have his payment. For the mirror.

  I’ll pay him for the mirror, dottore. You pay me for the finished piece.

  Serena looks at Crivano with narrowed eyes, like he’s an imbecile, but Crivano is already rising to his feet. I’ll return to collect the piece in two days, he says. Send word to me in the city if the project is delayed. I’m lodged at the White Eagle.

  It takes Crivano a moment to pay for his wine and to retrieve his robe and stick. By the time he’s muttered his valedictions and returned to the campiello, Verzelin is nowhere to be seen. He can’t have gotten far in his condition, but which way? Crivano looks for the linkboy who brought him here, but the boy has moved on. He could ask anyone else, of course, but he doesn’t want to leave more of a trail than necessary.

  He opts to turn right, down the Street of the Glassmakers. It’s long and straight and brightly lit—by glazed lanterns hung over doors, and also from within, by the white-hot furnaces—and edged along its left-hand side by a small canal choked with boats. If Verzelin came this way, he’ll be no trouble to spot.

  Crivano hurries forward, his walkingstick clutched by his side. He notes the brightly colored insignia of the shops he passes: an angel, a siren, a dragon, a cockerel devouring a worm. The shutters are all opened, the wares are on display, and more than once he’s startled by the image of his own anxious face.

  25

  A hundred yards down the fondamenta, just past a small fishmarket, Verzelin sways in front of the Motta mirrorworks, the shop that employs him, bellowing at his colleagues inside. The shop’s racks and shutters are a gallery of silvered panels—ovals and circles and rectangles, pocket-size or inches across, with frames of inlaid wood or wrought metal or chalcedony glass—and they render him in fragments: his hollow chest, his twisted limbs, the silent O of his shouting mouth.

  I’ve caught the Lord! he says. I have, I have, we all have! But what’s the good of catching if you never follow? No one in the shop comes to the windows; passersby give him wide berth. The bricks at his feet are spritzed with white foam.

  Crivano watches from a short distance up the quay. This is better, he thinks: better that he and Verzelin left the Salamander separately, and better that he’s had time to think. By now Obizzo will have moored the boat; he’ll be nearby, half a mile at most. The question is how to move Verzelin in the right direction. Crivano dealt with too many madmen during his years in Bologna to believe himself capable of anticipating their actions, but he has an intuition about this one, and no better ideas.

  He saunters forward, giving the mirrormaker an empty stare. Verzelin goes silent, his febrile eyes returning Crivano’s gaze, his lean bearded face a riot of tics and twitches. Then Crivano walks past him, carrying on down the fondamenta, the iron ferrule of his stick clicking sharply on the pavement.

  Confounded, Verzelin discharges a spate of rapid gibberish, unintelligible and bestial, and Crivano picks up his pace. There’s an opening on the right: the Street of the Potters. He makes the turn. Another glassworks here, along with two osterie and a lusterware factory; the other shops are dark and shuttered. Halfway down the block, Crivano steps into the recessed doorway of a mercer and waits.

  Verzelin isn’t far behind. With each step, his body angles left; he corrects himself like a ship beating to windward. The few people on the street hasten from his path. He murmurs as he comes. The peacock, he says, he’s a holy bird, a holy bird, a holy bird.

  Crivano steps into the open; the moonlight catches him. Verzelin, he says.

  Verzelin blinks, squints. Dottore? he says. Dottore Cri
vano?

  Yes. I’m here.

  I conjured you, Verzelin says. I called you from the glass.

  We must go, Verzelin. Do you understand? We must leave Murano tonight.

  Verzelin stares without comprehension, then squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, like a child who’s tasted raw onion.

  Listen to me. The guild and the Council of Ten have learned of our intentions. The sbirri are looking for you right now. There’s a boat nearby waiting to take us to Chioggia, but we must hurry.

  Verzelin grimaces, stares at his shuffling feet. In his expression Crivano can see an army of fleeting impulses being enveloped by profound weariness. I will follow, Verzelin mutters. I have looked. In the glass. What I have seen. And I will follow.

  Crivano finds a dry spot on Verzelin’s upper sleeve and tugs it to urge him along. There’s a wide square ahead—early-rising merchants’ wives filling pails at the well—and they angle away from it, following the curve of the street until they’re parallel to the glassmakers’ canal. Potters are at work nearby, singing a maudlin song about a drowned sailor, but he and Verzelin have the pavement to themselves.

  Crivano speaks softly and rapidly, reminding Verzelin of what they’re doing and why. From Chioggia we’ll sail to Ragusa, he whispers. In Ragusa an English cog will be waiting to take us to Amsterdam. We’ll be there in three weeks, God willing. And the guild’s prayers to Saint Anthony will be very fervent this year, I think.

  Don’t want, Verzelin says, don’t want to go to Amsterdam. Heretics! Full of heretics, it is.

  Well, you’ll have to convert them all, won’t you, Alegreto?

  Verzelin’s tremors have faded, but his feet are dragging, and his voice is blunted by his dripping mouth. Can’t work, he says. Lift the glass. Not anymore. My hands, dottore! My hands!

  Crivano wraps his fingers around Verzelin’s arm, glances ahead. He can see the lagoon now, and the quiet fondamenta where Obizzo is to have moored the boat. You won’t have to work the glass in Amsterdam, Crivano says, pulling him forward. They’ve found good workers for you there. Experienced men. You need only teach them to apply the silvering.

  I am afflicted, Verzelin moans. I have seen! There is no time, no time. Have you? Do you follow?

  Of course, maestro, Crivano says. Of course I do.

  Shutters open on a shop to the left, but Crivano doesn’t look back. I have caught him! Verzelin whispers, clutching Crivano’s hand. In my glass! I have, I have caught. Hold a mirror up to Christ, dottore! Is that not the Second Coming? Have you seen, dottore? Have you? What good is it to witness, if you never tell?

  They’ve reached the fondamenta. The lagoon is before them, black and limitless, with a scattering of lanterns across its surface, a careful thread of light that joins the mainland to the Grand Canal. From nearby buildings issue snores, muffled voices, the sound of a couple fucking, but no one is afoot. A hundred yards south along the quay is a stand of holly-oaks; Crivano spots a white rag draped over one of the lower limbs. Come on, he whispers, pulling Verzelin’s arm. Quickly.

  I worked so hard, Verzelin says. So hard. Now I see. The peacock, he’s a holy bird, dottore. Just count the eyes on his tail.

  Crivano takes a moment to scan windows and balconies, but no one seems to be watching them. They’re almost to the trees. On the quay before them, two kittens are picking at the discarded head of a shad; aside from them and the water, nothing moves. Crivano lets Verzelin step ahead, then puts a gentle hand on his back.

  The draped branch points to a palina where Obizzo’s small black sandolo is moored. Obizzo has removed the passengers’ chairs from his boat; there’s a wadded sheet of sackcloth in the bare hull, partly covering a coil of hemp cord and an irregular block of limestone. Obizzo himself is hunched in the stern, hidden under a broad-brimmed hat and a shabby greatcoat. As Crivano and Verzelin draw even with the bow, he stands and scrambles forward.

  Verzelin gasps, stops in his tracks. Even in his blighted state he recognizes Obizzo at once. You, he says.

  Crivano lifts his walkingstick crosswise in both hands and drives it against the base of Verzelin’s skull. Verzelin’s head pops forward, he staggers, and Crivano slips the stick under his chin, laying it across his neck just above the thyroid cartilage. Then he tucks the right end of the stick behind his own head, levers it back with his left arm, and crushes Verzelin’s larynx.

  Verzelin struggles, clawing the air, and Crivano catches his right wrist with his free hand to wrench it immobile. Obizzo has Verzelin’s legs; he twists them, grimacing fiercely, as if Verzelin is a forked green sapling he’s trying to snap in two. Held off the ground, Verzelin writhes, grasping at nothing with his unbound left arm. There’s a dull pop—a femoral head dislocating from an acetabulum—and Verzelin’s body goes heavy and slack.

  Like Antaeus, Crivano thinks. He holds on awhile longer, certain that the stick is tight across the carotid artery. Many years have passed since he last did this. He thinks about those other men—the touch and the smell of them, the sound of their interrupted breath—as he waits for Verzelin to die.

  Come on, come on, damn it! Obizzo whispers. His hat has fallen; he retrieves it, puts it on backward, turns it around, watching the lights in the nearby buildings with stray-dog eyes. Every soul in Murano would know him at a glance.

  All right, Crivano says. Take his legs.

  They put Verzelin’s body in the bottom of the hull and hide it with sackcloth. Crivano wraps the cord around the torso—both legs, both shoulders, a double-loop at the waist—and ties it with a surgeon’s knot.

  Obizzo is in the stern, his long oar at the ready. That’s enough, dottore, he says. Get out and cast me off.

  Crivano springs to the quay and plucks at the dockline. Be certain to put him in the water at San Nicolò, he says. Sink him in the channel. If the cord breaks, he should float out to sea.

  When will I hear from you?

  Crivano loops the line and drops it into the sandolo’s bow. I’ll find you in the Rialto, he says.

  When?

  Crivano doesn’t answer. He watches Obizzo bring the small boat about. The sleeves of Obizzo’s coat slide back when he lifts his oar, baring his thick forearms, and Crivano wonders what wild canards he tells his passengers to explain the burns that mottle his furnace-roasted skin. After a few long strokes and an angry backward glare, Obizzo fades into the dark.

  The insipid honking of geese comes from somewhere overhead. Crivano looks for the pale undersides of wings, but finds none. When the sky grows quiet again, he pulls the white linen from the holly-oak branch, wipes Verzelin’s spittle from his gown and stick, and throws the damp cloth into the lagoon. Then he rounds the point and returns to the Street of the Glassmakers, following it back across the long bridge, studying the shop windows along the way.

  His locanda is on the Ruga San Bernardo: lively by day, quiet at night, with no lock on its outer door and stairs to the lodgers’ rooms directly off the foyer. The widow who runs the place will hear him come in, but she won’t remember the hour. He bolts his door and rests his head against its wood and breathes deeply, conscious of the gallop of his pulse. Then he lights the clay lamp on the little table, hangs his clothes on the pegs beside the bed, and unties his purse.

  Two pinches of basil snuff cool his blood, but he’ll stay awake until he returns to the Rialto. He performs a few stretches that he remembers from the palace school at Topkapı, then sits and breaks the blue wax on Serena’s letter to Tristão. Unfolded, the outer layer of rag paper reveals a second document with an identical seal; Crivano sets this aside. Then he flattens the sheet that enclosed it, holds it over the lamp’s flame, and waits for the hidden writing to appear.

  26

  A cool wind leavens the fog over the lagoon, and the belltower of San Michele floats into view off the traghetto’s bow. Aside from Crivano, the boat’s only passengers are two tightlipped Tyrolean merchants, bundles clasped between their knees. The gondolier has no songs; he pauses o
ften in his rowing to blow his nose and tighten his greatcoat against the morning chill.

  Crivano is suffering a bit of rhinitis himself, along with a tightness in his throat, probably from the sleepless night. His has been a year of many such nights: recent episodes of hard travel, and prior to those long hours spent reading for his disputation, preparing to argue Galen with puffed-up chancellors who knew the Qanun of Ibn Sina only in translation, who’d never read al-Razi at all. Many a dawn found Crivano awake at his cluttered desk, or completing a difficult alchemical process in his tiny laboratory, and he’d rub his eyes and don his cloak and step out to wander the breezy colonnades of Bologna, feeling a melancholy thrill of inviolability, as if by waiting out the night he’d found a way to stop time, to free himself from human concerns. What pleased him most was that no one could see what he’d done, could know that he still had use of the day they’d discarded. And this, of course, echoed other secrets. Eyeing the smooth faces of students half his age as they shook off sleep and hurried to their lectures, Crivano would bite his inner cheek and marvel at his own lethal strangeness: the spider in the flower, the cuckoo in the nest.

  A white pulse flashes through the mist off starboard, the wings of an egret, and now Crivano sees scores of them, nested in a bend of willows at the eastern edge of San Cristofero della Pace. The tide is low, coming in: rocks slimed with eelgrass lie exposed in the shallows, and sea-smell fouls the air. Crivano presses a scented cloth to his face and watches a distant pair of fishermen work in their cut-reed weir. When he turns forward again, the square flanking towers of the Arsenal are before him.

  The traghetto puts out its fares. The Tyroleans hurry off to the south, shouldering identical burdens with identical hunches. Crivano stands aside to watch them go as the sniffling gondolier takes on more passengers. Behind him the mist has lifted, and a few Alpine snowcaps hang above the horizon, like chips in an old fresco.

  The smell of boiling pitch from the Arsenal has scoured away the tideland miasma, and Crivano tucks his sudarium back into his doublet. Columns of black and white smoke rise in ghostly parallel to the new belltower at San Francesco della Vigna, a near twin of the one in the Piazza: leaner, nearly as tall, its steep pyramidal crown already crazed by lightning-strikes. Crivano shades his eyes and notes that the side of the belfry overlooking the Arsenal has been bricked up. To spoil the vantage of spies, he imagines. Crivano and his fellows are hardly the only foreign agents intriguing against the Council of Ten.